I found it interesting that the city centres here all surround a gas station and are also named after whichever station is there, like Mobil or Texaco. The grand marché, post office, bush-taxi stations, and grocery stores are all next to the gas station. Everyone needs gas, I guess with all their 'motos'-mopeds- and cars to fill up. Makes me think about our suburb systems in North America which require people to own a car and consume gas in order to get to work or to city centres.
On arrival at the Omlés, I noticed that most houses had walls surrounding their property. There is a courtyard, always with a mango tree and sometimes plantain (like a giant banana) or papaya trees in the middle. Right now it's fruit season where oranges, grapefruits, and pineapples are ripe. The main house has the living quarters with cement floors, simple wooden furniture, small rooms for bucket showers, and, lucky me, toilets instead of latrines. There is however, no running water and we get water from the well that collects rain water to flush toilets and to take bucket showers with. The drinking water has to be collected from a pump at the end of the block, 300 m away. There is electricity and the kitchen has a gas stove that is rarely used; it's cooler to cook outside on a little portable oven.
My room consists of a double-sized bed, a chair, a table, and a closet. The three girls and their parents live in the house with Ernest's little brother Espoir and Felicité's niece Aquellé. The girls played a welcome concert on their flutes for me which made me feel very welcome but also kind of weird, because it seemed so formal. We sat down to dinner together as we would in the future, but without Espoir and Aquellé (I'm not sure why). We had fufu ,a pummeled kind of past made of mais, with a liquid red sauce with smoked fish, mushrooms, and onions. I ate with my right hand, as one is supposed to. The kids were quiet and very well-behaved, I'm slowly seeing the change in them, though, as we get to know each other. I felt fine.
That night when I settled to sleep under my mosquito net, a sinking feeling grabbed me. All of a sudden, I've had enough. I've had enough of all this foreign stuff. The house was different, the people were different, the air was different, everything was different, and I wanted so much to have just one person or one thing that was familiar to me. I really missed everyone at home. I was really sad and cried and wanted desperately to talk to a friendly; familiar voice on the phone. If I hadn't received such encouraging text messages from Mitra and Chantal, my two friends on the other side of the country in Vogan, I think the despair would have been palpable.
I guess I'm following the culture shock curve pretty well. I've had the excited happy initial 'honeymoon stage' when I was in Lomé. Now, the vacation is over, reality has set in and I'm here to stay . . . for 5 months--seems like an eternity. The homesickness is only really bad at night. Usually when I wake up in the morning, it's not so bad. Day by day, though, it's getting better. The adjusting begins hereon, I guess. I'll be fine.
At work things are very interesting. Yesterday, I sat in on a counselling session with Odette, a psychologist here at Vivre Mieux. She received a man who was HIV-positive and with his permission, I was allowed to observe. They spoke in Ewe, the local dialect, so I could only pick up on the bits and pieces of french that are mixed into the dialect. Odette would translate for me after every little while or so. This man, named Jean, had just come back from the hospital where his had a blood tested positive for HIV. He had been sick for a few months now, not knowing why he wasn't getting better. He was thin under his bobo and his face a solemn. He told us that he had already lost his wife four years ago and found out afterwards that she was HIV-positive. With him remain his twin teenage daughters who haven't gone to school since their mother died because their father does not make enough money to pay for their education. The girls have not been tested for HIV. Odette introduced to him Vivre Mieux's services.
Vivre Mieux is one of several other NGOs in Togo that are part of the country's HIV/AIDS care systems. VM takes HIV/AIDS affected people and children and supports them in various ways. For anyone who wants to find out about HIV can come here an be counselled. If there is someone who suspects of having contracted HIV, they can come here anonymously to seek help. VM sends them to the hospital for a blood test and afterwards takes care and keeps track of all the affected. In terms of services, VM pays the school fees, buys school books and uniforms for all the children or orphans that are affected or whose parents are affected by HIV. When their clients get sick, they can come to VM to seek help from a medical assistant, who, here, is the closest person to a doctor. A doctor who provides services that are free. And when there is enough money for medication, the clients receive the drugs, which they can barely afford on their own. Once a month, VM holds "reunions" for all their clients to get together and have a nutritious meal. Where clients are sick and cannot make it in, Odette, the other counsellors and medical assistants make house visits.
This is all funded by the UNDP Global Fund and administered by NGOs like VM. There is a serious lack of funding for anti-retro-viral drugs. VM recommends to the clients who have very low white blood cell counts (there are a few with less than 20) to go on ARV drugs. BUT, they do have to pay for it themselves because the drugs are expensive and are not covered by the funding. Here, they cost 5000 CFAs per moth (equivalent to CDN$12.50), and have to be taken for the rest of their lives. These drugs must be taken continuously in order to avoid developing virus immunity. The price for the drugs is way too high for the majority of the affected here. VM tries to make sure that the rest rely on good nutrition, when possible, and good mental, psychological health. Keeping people healthy through simple means, through counselling sessions, a nutritious meal once a month, and avoiding diseases through education are what VM's work entails.
Right now VM is looking to put together a sponsorship program where individuals can be sponsored to buy ARV drugs. It's only an idea on a notepad right now, but hopefully through partnerships with western NGOs it'll work out. Of course there are also various projects, such as building water pumps in villages, peer-to-peer HIV/AIDS training sessions, and village education about sanitary conditions, to name a few, that make up VM's work. For these projects, VM seeks independent funding from international organizations.
My work here is to build VM's communication capacity. Very recently, Guy, the director here, has invested in some very powerful computers that are capable of editing videos, designing graphics for websites and publications. The employees here do not know how to use these tools to build a strong communication strategy. I'm going to try to share what I know about these tools, so that VM can make websites, brochures, bulletins, posters, and film. All this media will be used in training sessions, to facilitate learning in the village education projects, to connect to the international community for information sharing, and to reach potential partners and funders for future projects to make people's lives here in Togo better. So, I am very excited and eager to get on with the work.
I guess Halloween is coming up in Canada. The Omlé girls know about pumpkins and Halloween! When I showed them the pictures Kate Ullrich had taken of pumpkins they all simultaneously yelled out "les citruilles." There are no pumpkins in Togo. When I proceeded to tell them about Halloween, they said with bored eyes "yeah, yeah, and then the kids say 'trick or treat' and get candy . . " They were fascinated by the idea of snow and ice, though.
