Two Years in Togo

From 1996 to 1998 I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo, a tiny country barely touching the coast of West Africa. On this site are a handful of memories from my Peace Corps experience and some tales of Togo I can never forget.

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Here are a few of my favorite images from my two years in Togo.

 

Issa’s Family

Issa (top row, far left) is a Muslim mason who lives in Blitta. Here he is with his some of his brothers and sisters. His father had five or six wives, and more than 30 people lived together in his compound. Impossible to figure out who was who. He was very sweet natured. I hired him to do some work on my shower stall. He did a very good job and didn’t try to rip me off as is normal with the newcomer when you move to an underdeveloped country. I liked him very much.

Issa knew I had a camera, so when he asked me to come and take some photos of his family, I was delighted. Photos are very important to everyone in Togo, and at the time it wasn’t easy to find someone with a camera. Not only that, you had to go to Lome to get the developing done. (This was before digital cameras had been invented. ) That was a five and a half hour bush taxi ride, one way.

I understood, without him asking, that this was a favor I was doing for him. He had been kind to me and especially after seeing how poor they were, there was no way I was going to take any money for taking a few photographs for him. When I brought him the photos later, he and his father were very grateful, even more so when I refused reimbursement.

I think that’s his mother standing right next to him in this photo. Also some of his father’s other wives, and more brothers and sisters.

Although there’s no question that they were quite poor, consider this: in Blitta there were many houses that were made of mud with straw roofs. This family had a cement block house with a tin roof, plus they had their own well within the walls of their compound. And the building they’re standing in front of, that’s not a barn. That’s their home.

Issa sits here at the edge of the uncovered well. Since there is no electricity and no running water in this village, water is drawn from the well in rubber bags at the end of long ropes. There was a similar well in the compound where I lived.

This is the typical way that larger Blitta houses were built. The compound is large, so they had four wings, built in a square formation. There are separate rooms in these wings, none of which connect to each other and each of which opens out onto the courtyard. In this way, they didn’t need to build a fence around their land. The house itself served as the “fence.” There was one small opening between two of the wings where people could enter into the compound.

Here is Issa with his father and one of his father’s wives. She is washing dishes. Just beyond her and to the right is her stove: a very simple brazier. Outdoor kitchens are the norm in the villages. When temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees outside, add about ten degrees to that to a room with a tin roof. Plus, there’s the smoke. The Togolese don’t know how to build chimneys. The one advantage Togolese “kitchens” have is that you do all your cooking and food preparation sitting down!

The little stool the woman is sitting on is her all-purpose stool which she sits on for food prep, cooking, washing dishes and probably washing clothes. I had a local carpenter make me one as soon as I arrived in Blitta. He designed it just a little taller and wider than those made for everyone else. It was made of teak and cost something like three dollars. It soon became a cherished necessity. When I left Togo, I was shipping six boxes of Togo souvenirs home, and I really gave it a lot of thought whether I wanted to go to the additional expense of shipping yet another big box with a very heavy teak stool in it. I finally gave it away to a village family. Although I felt good about it at the time, as they had so little and I was after all taking home some amazing woodcrafted items, it was a decision which I have regretted ever since. Stupid, to be so sentimental about a piece of wood, but that’s me.

 

Everyday Living

Not much has changed in Togo for many decades. Modern conveniences such as electricity, telephones and even indoor plumbing are still unavailable to most of the people in this poverty-ridden country. Not only does the infrastructure not exist; but even if it did, most Togolese can’t afford an electric or telephone bill. Most families grow as much of their own food as possible and live on less than $300 a year.

This woman is making a batch of tchouk (pronounced “chook,” rhymes with shook), West Africa’s local beer made from millet. It has a varnish-like bouquet (an acquired taste). I had it a few times to be social, but I never acquired a fondness for it.

Making tchouk is very time consuming. She will make only what she can sell in one day, as tchouk and everything else spoils quickly in the relentless tropical heat. She sells bowlfuls at the weekly market for five cents each. Men gather at the tchouk hut every market day and get soused for a quarter.

Women have to get water from streams or wells, returning home with it in huge basins carried on their heads. They are also in charge of gathering firewood for cooking needs.

This woman is using a Togolese food processor (a flat rock on which food is scraped until it is pureed), one of Togo’s modern conveniences found in abundance . With no electricity and no refrigeration, each meal is prepared from scratch. Adults eat first. When they are finished they hand their plates to the children, who polish off anything that may be left. I soon learned that there was always a child ready and happy to eat anything that I couldn’t finish and right from the same plate I was using. It was hard for me to do at first, as it is not the American way. But in this culture, it is not insulting or patronizing. They would have thought me crazy and sinfully wasteful if I threw my leftover food away.

She’d love a Maytag!

Doing laundry by hand is quite a job. Sometimes I would start at 6 a.m. and be finished by 10 or 11 a.m. Women who had big families had to do it more often than I did, but their daughters were also pressed into service.

There was a well in my courtyard from which water was drawn by dropping a rubber bag on a rope, pulling it up and filling a metal pail. It took about three bagfuls to fill the pail. I needed two buckets for washing and two for rinsing. If I waited until even 9 a.m., it would already be 90 degrees and I wouldn’t want to do it. I made it a habit to get my water by moonlight (when it was only about 80 degrees).

Hand washing is brutal on clothes, and the thin cotton material everyone wears usually lasted only a year or so. None of the T shirts I brought with me or the clothes I had made in Africa for everyday wear made it out of Togo alive.

 

Settling in at Blitta

My village was Blitta (BLEE-ta), halfway up country on the north-south “highway,” one of the few paved roads in the country. It was also known as Blitta Carrefour (crossroads) to distinguish it from Blitta Gare (rhymes with car, French for “station”), a village five kilometers west of the main road, where the freight train line terminated. Blitta Gare was also the capital of the prefecture, a geographical division similar to a county in the United States.

Blitta Carrefour is a significant village because the road is wide enough there for truck drivers to pull over and park their trucks without impeding through traffic. Most of the north-south highway was a two-lane road in battered, miserable condition. It was pockmarked with potholes, and some stretches were unpaved. From Lome to Atakpame you could make good time because the road was reasonably decent between those two points. It got much worse the further north you went. As Blitta was the halfway point to the Burkina Faso border, many truckers would spend the night, rolling out a grass mat and sleeping under their trucks.

This is a view of Blitta taken from the north end of the village showing a small portion of the houses on the east side of the road. The land to the west of the road had a large clearing and a forest but no houses or buildings of any kind except an abandoned three-compartment latrine. The clearing with its waist-high grass served as a giant outdoor toilet for the villagers, another reminder of how poor these people are. No family in Blitta had a latrine. No one could afford to buy the cement to build one. The clearing was also where they threw most of their garbage. No one had the money for a hoe (shovels are not commonly seen in Togo) to dig a hole to bury the garbage, nor the education to understand why that was better sanitation.

Blitta was also famous for having a street light, a motel and a telephone! All of these amenities were operated by the motel, which was one of the few establishments in the region with a generator. The motel was a group of a half dozen huts with grass roofs. Because the motel had a generator, the rooms were equipped with fans. There was also a decent latrine. Even with all these amenities, most truck drivers could not afford the few dollars to stay the night there and slept on the ground under their trucks instead. The motel also had a restaurant, but there were a couple of other restaurants in the area, so they were not uniquely known for that. (The photo above was taken during the harmattan season, Togo’s winter, where winds carry fine dust particles from the northern region, creating hazy conditions and white skies.)

The shack in the photo above was one of Blitta’s roadside restaurants. It was little more than a covered table with a bunsen burner offering cooked eggs and extremely simple meals. There was bread with waxy, fake imitation margarine (yes, I know how redundant that is, I’m trying to emphasize how horrible and nasty this crap really was), which had to be used because there was no electricity and real dairy products would quickly spoil. The waxy, fake imitation margarine was so fake and waxy, it hardly ever melted, even in the African heat. There was powdered coffee with powdered milk and of course fufu. It was cheap, so truck drivers ate there a lot. I quickly got familiar with the restaurants in the village, and this was one I where I never ate.

In the foreground on top of the logs, and looking like small logs themselves, are piles of ignames (IN-yams), a huge, potato-like tuber used to make fufu, the favorite Togolese dish. Fufu is to the Togolese like hamburgers, pizza and apple pie are to Americans. They’d eat it five times a week if they could.