Of Goodness and Guilt

A couple of months ago we received an amazing surprise in the mail: a letter from Kodjo, the son of Afoua, my best Togolese friend while I was in the Peace Corps. Gabi and I were both misty-eyed as we read Kodjo's letter, and we were full of pride when he told us that he was attending university in Lome while his younger sister, Adjo, was in high school. The Togolese education system is enormously expensive as well as mercilessly meritocratic ~ exams cull all but the brightest students from entering high school. So for both Adjo and Kodjo to be doing so well says a great deal of good about their intelligence, perseverence and good fortune.

I found a letter that I wrote home on May 26, 1991:

Still it is raining – nearly a “white out” of fog and sheets of water. The acacia trees are thrashing back and forth; the palm about a hundred yards away is all but invisible. A couple of women from the marché are hiding out with Afoua under the eaves, and a goat somewhere is bleating plaintively. It is raining too much for any work to be done. But this also means it’s raining too much for anyone to fight a civil war or revolution. It’s been very quiet politically these last couple of days. It’s raining too much for anything but showers.

Kodjo and Adjo are dancing naked under the sheets of water falling off the roof. They kick and jump and sing at the top of their voices to drown out the roar of the storm. Kodjo shadow-boxes like the Ninja warriors someone saw in an American “B” movie and then told him about. He plants his feet and strikes out his hands while the water all but envelops him. Adjo stomps in the water, head down, blowing water out of her mouth – PWOO! PWOO! – and reaches up to rub her fuzzy head while the water pelts it. Then suddenly the rain stops and the two dash off, streaking through mud puddles and grass to go gather fallen mangoes that the storm knocked off the tree.

I admit that Kodjo's letter sat beside the computer for a few weeks before we wrote back. It's not that I wasn't thinking about my reply, it's not that I didn't want to write him. No. It was the French.

During the three years that I lived in Togo, I learned to speak French with a decent amount of fluency. Actually, perhaps I should have put that in quotes, as in "speak French." As in, the language I cobbled together would have sounded horrifyingly plebeian to anyone born in France. In the former French colony of Togo, I had teachers who tried hard to teach me proper French grammar, pronunciation and speech patterns. But I lived in a small village and worked with people who had little formal education. With them, I either spoke “pidgin” French or I wasn’t understood.

Formal, written French has always been beyond my grasp. I tried to read a few French novels while in country and gave up. It was just too different and difficult, and it made it more difficult to speak with the Togolese around me. I was able to read Kodjo's letter well enough ~ I understood a large enough majority of the words to guess my way through those that I didn't recognize, and so arrive at the general gist of the letter.

However, my written French, even when I was speaking French every day, was awful. Now, for me to write in French is all but impossible.

By the way, Yahoo's Babel Fish is a great tool. Yes, we used it. But like most translating tools, web-based or otherwise, it's also fundamentally ignorant of language. Synonyms, homonyms, colloquialisms, all these tend to get mixed up so that your translated text has the occasional bits of word-salad nonsense. It is particularly entertaining when the proper nouns can be translated as well. Par example: my name translates to "held up" in French. I never knew that until I started writing to Kodjo and translated the letter first from English to French and then back to English. It's odd to me that I lived for three years in a French-speaking country and only learned about the unsavory character of my name last week.

In spite of the difficulty, we wrote back to Kodjo. We translated, checked and rechecked the language and the spelling until we felt pretty sure that we would not completely embarrass ourselves or confuse him with baffling syntax. Then we e-mailed our letter. That's right. Kodjo has an e-mail address. He's not just attending the university, he's computer literate.

From our friend and fellow RPCV Jennie, we know that there are now Internet Cafes in Lome as well as in other major cities in Togo. This is so inconceivable for me, in part because she has also told us that the standard of living in Togo has fallen dramatically since we were there. Roads that had a few pot-holes while we served in Togo are all but impassable now. Even the national highway is down to a single lane in places. The value of the currency (CFA) has fallen dramatically, while AIDS and other maladies have grown more widespread (guinea worm being one of the few exceptions to this). Poverty is acute and government corruption is endemic.

But technological progress has made its inroads, and now there are cell phones and Internet cafes in Togo as in other developing nations. It boggles my mind. I've written about this before, I know, but technological advances can look so schizophrenic when juxtaposed with such profound poverty and a miserable standard of living.

So, back to my original thread: we e-mailed Kodjo, telling him how happy we were to hear from him, how proud we were of him and his sister for still being in school, etc. He wrote us back, enthused about hearing from us. That was good, but his letter was also oozing with the guilt-inducing tendencies of Togolese conversations.

I don't want to get stereotypical here, but different cultures do have certain unique tendencies in the way people express themselves. I think often in the US we tend toward sarcasm and cynicism and shy from heartfelt emotion. Gabi tells me that when wishing a Swiss person happy birthday, a simple card with "have a great day" will not do. One must add in some flowery verbage as well.

And in Togo, I think one of the ways to let someone know "I care about and miss you" is to say how dreadful your life has been without him/her and how you've been bereft over the long silence/absence and no one else cares for or helps him/her the way you did and...

This style of language might not be so troubling except that I do feel guilty about the people and work I left behind in Togo. When I left to come back to the US I made promises that I could not keep, everything from "Yes, I will write you" to "You'll be okay, I know it." I did not keep writing. I lost the language so quickly when I came back to the US, especially since I had very rarely written French when I was living there. I got distracted by grad school, difficulties with my family, and making a life with Gabi in Minnesota. I felt angry and helpless because every letter from Togo came with a guilt-inducing message followed by a plea for money, please send some CFA, no one will help us since you left, we despair every day without you.

The simple truth is that things did get worse for Kodjo and his family after I left. Afoua lost her home after she lost the income I gave her for helping me. She had to leave Agou village and move in with her sister in Lome. She now works for her sister as a domestic servant instead of working for herself. Her health declined, and when Jennie saw her a couple of years ago (in Togo again to do fieldwork for her dissertation), Afoua had an endless litany of woes and maladies.

After I returned to the US, I laid awake nights worrying about Afoua. More specifically, I worried that somehow, in spite of my very real efforts to help, I had done her wrong. I employed her for the three years I lived in Togo, and she provided immeasurable help to me. Not just things like carrying water and washing clothes, but also helping me to navigate the social and cultural norms and customs, to remember names and learn family connections. I truly would not have made it in Peace Corps without her. But I worried that even as she helped me, and I did pay her well, there wouldn't be anything in place for her and her family after I left. She made palm oil, a horrifically demanding job, and during the three years she worked for me she used her money very wisely, I thought, and gradually bought larger and larger pots so that she could make more oil to sell. She was thinking about "after Blandina" (as she called me), and that was good. But she couldn't make enough with the oil to make up for the salary she lost when I left. I suspected this would happen, and I worried about it so much, wondering if I had helped her better her life at all or only helped raise her standard of living temporarily so she'd have farther to fall.

However, she was able to keep Kodjo and Adjo in school, so things were not as bad as they could have been. We are so proud of all of them for this. For these two young people to make it this far in the Togolese education system is just huge. And I do intend to write back to Kodjo, and we'll send some money from time to time. It seems like the least I can do.