Whatever Happened to Mimi

Dogs and cats aren’t common in the villages of Togo nor in the larger towns. Poor people can’t afford pets. If they have a cat or a dog, that animal is there for a reason, and it isn’t the bond of affection between human and beast.

People are so poor that it’s rare that anyone has any leftover food to give even to animals which they raise for food, such as chickens, ducks or pygmy goats. The animals have to forage around the village for their own food. I never could start a compost pile because no matter what I threw out there, and no matter how stinky or disgusting it was, it would get eaten almost immediately by passing chickens and ducks. Potato peels, spoiled food that reeked and had mold growing on it. It didn’t matter. The chickens, ducks and pygmy goats ate it all.

So it was a pleasant surprise to see a cat in my host family’s compound. Mimi was a skinny, dirty tabby that belonged to Komi, my African father. My first meeting with Mimi was when I ate dinner with the family one night, a few days after my arrival in Blitta village. We were eating outside, as everyone did. It was customary just to drop the bones or whatever part of your meal was inedible on the ground. Mimi was friendly and rubbed against my legs, waiting for her chance. As soon as I dropped a chicken bone on the ground, I heard crunch, crunch, crunch as Mimi ate anything that was dropped. I liked her.

Mimi was pretty skinny and resorted to stealing food from any of the women in our compound who were preparing a meal the second they weren’t paying attention. So all the women in my area hated poor Mimi. Everyone hated her but Komi and me.

After a month or so, I noticed Mimi’s absence. I asked around, and no one knew what became of her. She could have died of starvation or gotten hit by a car. Life is hard in Togo for both animals and people. So time went on, and I sort of forgot about her.

I developed a friendship with Wentarba, the village’s best carpenter. He, unlike my family members, would sometimes fill me in on interesting events that took place in the village that I would otherwise have not known about. Although French is the official language in Togo and I was fluent in French, there are also dozens of local languages. In Blitta alone, there were at least four. Not everyone spoke French. In my family, everyone could speak French, but they frequently spoke Aniangan or something else with other villagers. And they certainly were not going to translate every little thing for me. Wentarba lived a quarter mile up the road but would stop to say hello each time he passed by my house. Sometimes we would go out for a beer and he would tell me things that no one else had, which made me feel less socially isolated. Plus, he was one of the few people in the village who wasn’t trying to get money or something else out of me. He was a true friend.

A few weeks later, Wentarba went on a trip to his old village to visit family. He was even nice enough to stop by before he left to let me know he was going to be gone for a while. Turned out he was gone a couple of weeks, and I definitely missed him. While there were others who would say hello, no one else really engaged me in conversation like Wentarba did.

When Wentarba returned, he stopped by my place a day or so later in the evening to visit and invite me out for a beer. We walked over to the bar at the Motel de Paillotes (PYE-yotes) and sat outside under the big paillote. A paillote is essentially four poles holding up a cone-shaped thatched roof. The French word for straw is paille, hence the name. It serves as an outdoor room. Since it has no walls at all, it was cooler to sit under than sitting inside the cinderblock building where the bar was.

We each nursed a Bière de Benin, the Togolese manufactured brew, and he filled me in on what he did on his trip. Finally, he dropped a bombshell.

“Do you remember Mimi?” he asked me.

“Sure, she was Komi’s cat.”

Wentarba went on to say that on his way back to Blitta, he made a stop at a nearby village, some place north of Tchebébé, and saw some of his friends by the road. They invited him to eat with them, which he accepted. It was a special dinner, because they were having cat. I immediately knew what had happened to Mimi. But there was more.

It came up during the conversation over dinner that the meal had been purchased from a woman who lived in the white house near the road in Blitta. Well, there was only one white house near the road in Blitta – the one that I lived in. But which one of the women in my compound who so hated Mimi had done it? Wentarba revealed that it was Komi’s daughter, Marie. She waited until Komi was out of town and sold Mimi to someone who had stopped by the house in a bush taxi and saw the cat in the yard. Not only did she get rid of a nuisance, but she got a little money for it at the same time.

In Togo, cats and dogs are considered a delicacy, especially for certain ethnic groups. The Kabyé are known to be particularly fond of dog. A few Volunteers had been offered dog and had tried it, and one said it tasted like chicken, but I’m pretty sure he was being a wise guy. As for me, I don’t think I could have brought myself to eat cat or dog if offered. I’m glad I was never in a situation where it was offered.

I mulled this news over awhile. It was interesting because, although Komi was well liked by some, he was also feared by many. It was surprising to me that his own daughter, who knew that her father liked that cat, would be the one to get rid of it. Maybe she thought she could get away with it because she was just visiting and lived in another village rather far away, plus she left to go back home before Komi returned. I’m sure the other women in the family knew all about this, but no one had said anything to me. Maybe they thought I would tell Komi, and he would be mad at all of them for allowing it to happen.

I was sad to hear of poor Mimi’s demise, but the rest of the story was even more surprising. After they had eaten Mimi, they began to bid on who would get to eat her head. Wentarba told me that some people, and I inferred that meant those who believe in witchcraft, believe that if you eat seven heads of the same kind of animal, you would acquire its characteristics: In the case of a cat, if you fell off a wall, you would get up and walk away. If you got in a car crash, you would get out and walk away. He told me that he had given the highest bid, and he was the one who got to eat Mimi’s head.

I was trying not to screw up my face and go “EEEEWWW!!!”

“The whole head?”

“Yes, the whole head.”

“Brains and eyes and everything??” I was trying to imagine if they just scooped out the brains or if they crunched it up, skull and all. It was the second one. Useless to ask how it tasted. He would have said it was good. But the truth was, I didn’t really want to know.

“Yes, everything.”

“So, how many cat heads have you eaten, in total?”

“Five.”

The story reinforced to me that it wasn’t a good idea for a Volunteer to have a pet. Some Volunteers couldn’t help themselves when confronted with the sight of puppies or kittens in their village but then had to deal with finding their pet a home when their term of service was over. I’m sure many of them never realized why it was so easy to find a “home” for their Togolese pets or what would really happen to the animal the moment the Volunteer left the village.

I was just glad that I hadn’t seen Mimi enough to get attached to her before her disappearance.

Getting Back to Pagala

One of the side benefits to spending several days with Volunteers au village was that it gave the stagiares the opportunity not only to learn first hand how to get around on the bush taxi system, but it also gave us an immediate opportunity to use what we learned. Although the Peace Corps had driven us to the live-in posts, the stagiares were expected to get themselves to the training camp at Pagala by themselves, on bush taxis.

On the way to the live-in, we had driven through the junction at Langabou that led to Pagala. The Route Nationale, the main (only) paved north-south road that went from Lomé to Ouagadougou, formed a “T” junction at Langabou, and the only other road connecting to the Route Nationale there was the road to Pagala, so it wouldn’t be at all hard to get there.

We all woke up early. We had been told it was always best to get an early start because with the bush taxis around Bitchabé, you never know what’s going to happen. It rained like hell for about a half hour, then we went out to the taxi stand. Bitchabé is on a dirt road well off the Route Nationale, so it doesn’t have the best access or service. Not many taxis would be coming there that day because the heavy tropical rains turned the dirt road into a muddy soup that the taxis could get stuck in. Pam would accompany us to Bassar and make sure that we got on a taxi there that was bound for Sokodé. To get to Pagala, we would have to get off the bush taxi at Langabou and find a local taxi that made the Langabou-Pagala run. After you do it a few times, it’s no more difficult than changing trains on a subway system, but for the very first time, Sally and I were just a bit nervous.

We finally got a place on a bush taxi. It got a flat on the way to Bassar. They fixed it. Then it couldn’t get up a small hill with the load it was carrying, so we all had to get out and walk up. But finally we made it to Bassar and got a taxi right away for Sokodé, where we were to spend the night at the Peace Corps maison de passage. There was no way to make the trip from Pam’s house to Pagala before nightfall unless you were being driven there in a well-maintained Peace Corp vehicle which didn’t make any stops.

Maison de passage was a rather glamorous name that evoked a gently decaying colonial mansion serving out its final years as a hotel for Peace Corps Volunteers who were passing through. No doubt it was staffed by the Peace Corps and although the place was old, the rooms were clean. This charming fantasy couldn’t have been further from reality.

Peace Corps Disgusting Filthy Flophouse was far more accurate. It wasn’t staffed by anyone, just used frequently by the PCVs in the region and was available as an overnight stopping place for any PCV passing through.

As there was no one to let you in, the method of entry was ingenious. The front gate was secured with a combination padlock. Affixed to the gate was a small sign with clues to the padlock combination which were impossible to decode by anyone but the PCVs. For example, for the first number, the clue was “an American TV show named ____ is Enough.” They don’t get American TV in Togo, and most people don’t even have TV sets, much less electricity, plus very few Togolese speak English, so there’s no way any Togolese would have ever known about Eight is Enough.

Walking through the gates, you had to watch your step, as the sidewalk was broken and you could easily trip. The maison was on the second story of a dilapidated building. The handrail on the steps wasn’t fully there.

As the maison was not staffed, no one was responsible for cleaning it, either. For payment, you just left $1,000 CFA per night ($2.00) in an envelope in one of the drawers in the hall bureau. From time to time someone from the Peace Corps would come to collect the money.

It was so disgustingly filthy that I couldn’t even stand the thought of taking a shower there. It seemed ridiculous anyway, as I had no clean clothes, there not having been enough time to wash them when we visited Pam.

There were some quaint and charming filthy mattresses on the floor for people to sleep on, with dustballs as big as tumbleweeds floating around everywhere. About the only positive thing I could say about the place was that because there were no wooden bed frames for bedbugs to hide in while they waited for their next tasty meal, I didn’t get any bug bites there. But I never stayed at a Peace Corps maison de passage again.

Bad Attitudes

Went out for a beer that night with some Volunteers who were also staying the night at the co-ed Filthy Flophouse. They had been in Togo a year, and like most Volunteers, the majority were women in their early 20s. A few of them had really crappy attitudes towards the Togolese, especially one woman who was extremely rude to an Togolese man who saw us all sitting there and came to introduce himself out of curiosity. She refused even to try to speak French with him and rudely ran the guy off, saying how sick she was of these obnoxious African men. I told her it seemed to me he was simply being friendly.

The rudeness and nasty attitudes of these Volunteers were embarrassing to me as an American representing my country in a foreign land. I hoped that not all Volunteers became as cynical and bilious as these people were. Once again, I was sorry that I had gone out somewhere in a group.

One of the reasons we were there at the bar was that one of the Volunteers was taking an Early Termination. He had a really bad attitude concerning the Peace Corps work he was doing, despite the fact that the country director had allowed him to change his post and his job responsibilities more than once. But at least he liked Africa and the Africans and spoke French with them. Two Togolese musician friends of his who he jammed with, came by to say goodbye and give him a parting gift.

Practically no Volunteer except the soon to be departing Volunteer spoke to the two Togolese musicians, partly because their French was lousy (the Volunteers’ not the Togolese) but mostly because of extreme lack of interest. After I finished pumping one of the women Volunteers for information on what it was like to be a Volunteer in Togo, I turned my attention to the musicians and had a very nice conversation with them. They were impressed with my French and assured me that any time I’m in Sokodé, I now have friends there. They gave me their phone number.

I don’t like Sokodé. It’s really hot, really dry and nothing about it is interesting, but now I want to return to listen to Inoussa and Esso play guitar.

I then went to dinner with a health Volunteer who was close to my age. We had a nice conversation, but she was not very social and I did not at all get the impression that she was interested in developing a friendship. So much for my support system in Africa.

Couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Sokodé the next morning and get to Pagala, where we would train for the next 12 weeks. I had brought only one change of clothes for the three day live-in at Bitchabé, which normally would have been enough, but not, as I discovered, when it’s humid. Not only was there no time to wash clothes, but they took several days to dry if they were hung up inside. I couldn’t wait to get to Pagala, get cleaned up and be reunited with my suitcases and some clean clothes.

Finding a bush taxi to Pagala was easy. There was a gare, a taxi staging area, a couple of blocks away from the Filthy Flophouse. Anything going south would get us there, so it was just a matter of waiting for the next minivan to come along. I was happy to leave Sokodé, but we would meet again.