First month at post

I've just finished up my first month at post, so I thought it was time for a blog update!! My first month definitely had lots of ups and downs, but I feel like I'm finally getting settled here. My little house is starting to feel like my home thanks to more furniture, a finished porch, some wall decorations, and most importantly my new puppy, Jeeves. I've had Jeeves for a little over a week now and it's been so fun! It's great to have a little puppy to play with everyday. My host family jokingly calls him my baby since I give him the love and attention that would be normal in the U.S. but that is completely weird here. However, since it's obvious how much I love him, my host family has been doing a good job watching out for him for me.

In the past week, I've started eating dinners with my family. This has been nice for two reasons: 1. I hate cooking by flashlight 2. It gives me an opportunity to hang out with my host family and to get more comfortable with them. Since my host dad won't let me pay money for meals, I've been trying to contribute by buying food that they can use to cook the meals with. Most meals consist of pate with sauce. Pate is this corn staple that is basically just finely ground corn mixed with water and it's about the consistency of polenta. This is eaten with a sauce of usually peanuts or okra. The other day, I had been craving my favorite Togolese meal, beans and gari, which is just cooked beans mixed with oil, spices, and this stuff called gari that is crunchy manioc flour. I bought a bunch of beans and oil at the market and then my host family made awesome beans and gari and we all ate it together. I've been enjoying eating with them, so I think this will be a nice setup.

In regards to my official "work", I've had several meetings that I think will lead to projects and activities. I met with an english teacher at the local middle school who wants to start up an english club. I said I would help out and we're having our first official meeting tomorrow. Students here start to learn english at the CEG, the equivalent of middle school, and they have to pass an exam in english to move onto high school. However, most classes are really large, at the Mango CEG each class has about 100 students, and as anyone who has ever tried to learn a language can imagine, huge classrooms aren't that conducive to learning languages. The kids mainly learn by repetition and memorization, but they often don't really understand what they're saying. For example, when I was introducing myself to the different classes, each time they all stood up and said to me "Good morning sir, how are you?" They have a male teacher, so they'd memorized saying "sir" without realizing that "sir" is only meant for males. Anyways, the idea is that an english club will be an informal place where students can gain better english comprehension, so we'll see how it goes. I also had a meeting with a Red Cross women's group in Magna. I'm working with a Togolese Red Cross volunteer from Mango and we're hoping to start Moringa gardens with the women's groups. Moringa is a tree with highly nutritious leaves that women can cook with and that helps fight malnutrition. The women seemed excited about the idea, but it's really hard to organize people right now, because everyone is busy with harvest. However, in a month, harvest will be over and people will have a lot more time to meet and get engaged with potential projects like the Moringa gardens.

So, overall, things are going fairly well. I just wanted to leave you all with one funny image. Whenever I've traveled in Africa, I've always seen funny examples of people wearing clothing and items donated from the West. Some of my favorites were people wearing Santa hats in Niger and here it's common to see an old chief wearing one of those leopard or zebra print cowboy hats that you'd see strippers wearing in the movies. However, the other day, I saw my favorite example yet. I was biking in Mango and I saw a teenage boy biking along wearing a bear costume that was probably meant for a second grader. It had the ears, tail, and was WAY to small for the kid wearing it. Anyways, that was my favorite image of the week, so I thought I'd share. I hope everyone has a great Christmas and New Years!!!