Diggin' those free pics! (MToaS 25)

When my lovely Gabi and I first returned from our Peace Corps service in Togo, West Africa... and this was 1993, mind you... we couldn't wait to go to the grocery store. Especially Gabi. She'd been having dreams of Doritos, don't you know. Three years we'd been in Togo, often eating in little roadside buvets drinking warm beer and eating fried bread or cassava that was sometimes scrumptious and sometimes just foul with rancid oil.  Or rice with various sauces ~ again, some amazingly good and some just god-awful.

So we got back and my goodness, we really wanted that good-ol-bad-for-you American junk food.

It's one of my most vivid memories of our return. We drove to Coborns and Gabi went to get some Doritos while I dashed off to find something else. She took a long time, so I started looking for her. I rounded the corner and found her standing in the center of the looong snack aisle, shoulders slouched and jaw slack, a look of being completely overwhelmed on her face. She was nearly crying. All she wanted was one little bag of Doritos and here was an entire aisle of brands, flavors, big bags, small bags, full-fat, low-fat... and good-god there were pretzels too.

I get a similar sort of feeling when I look at widget options.

Creativity is wonderful. I am glad there is so much of it. But, wow, if we could harness the enthusiasm for quizzes and comments and discussion communities found on the web and turn that instead toward diplomacy... why, we might even get peace in the Middle East.

Still, I enjoy the wealth of ideas and the possibilities for customizing your space. It's cool. It made me want to add one more item to the article 20 Usability Tips for Your Blog. The author suggested limiting the focus of your blog. I'd include limiting the number of gizmos and widgets. Have a rotating collection, sure, but too much at one time just overwhelms the senses.

That said, some of these widgets are incredibly useful. I've been using site meter, clustrmap,  as well as Blogger's subscriber widget and search bar for some time. I like all these tools immensely. There's nothing like looking on clustrmap and wondering who in New Zealand has been reading me. 

I added a recent comments widget, but I put it at the bottom of the page. That probably breaks every rule of blog promotion, but it felt better to me all the same. I also added click comments. I have some shy readers, I know, who have said in phone calls or e-mail that they like what they read on my blog but they just don't  feel comfortable leaving comments. Perhaps they're not sure what to say. I like the "thumbs up" feel of click comments, and am hoping that will make these readers (you know who you are) more comfortable giving feedback.

Lastly, thanks Things staff, for the listing of copyright free and Creative Commons licensed photos. It can be hard sometimes to find pics to add to my pages ~ and I do like to include them because I know they improve the look and readability of the blog.

The one tool I want to find (hoping that Blogger supports it) is the "read more" link. I do sometimes write long entries and it would be better to have the blog not look so text-heavy. Any suggestions?

Sending out a little hope

I wrote a while ago about receiving a letter from Kodjo, the son of my best Togolese friend while I was in the Peace Corps. We've been e-mailing Kodjo regularly, and it's been great to re-form that connection after years of quiet. It has been heartbreaking as well, so much so that I hope you will forgive me as I step onto my soapbox.

Some of you may know, but most probably do not, that Togo has had a rough year. The economy is poor here, but it is devastatingly weak there. Prices for staples like rice and flour have soared as the US has redirected corn toward ethanol instead of food for people or animals. As if that weren't enough, Togo was hit with devastating floods in July, washing out bridges on the main highway, destroying homes and villages, and killing many people. This natural disaster has compounded the economic one because it has made travel and trade between the cities and outlying areas much more difficult.

The floods have brought a lot of misery to the region, but we've played our part as well. Just in case you are not clear on why we, US citizens, share at least some of the responsibility for the dire circumstances in places like Togo, here is a brief and basic synopsis.

The US has enormous power to force "Free Trade Agreements" on developing nations like Togo (the US / World Bank forgives and/or reconfigures national debt in return for signing on the dotted line). These trade agreements push developing nations away from growing enough of their staple food crops to be self-sustaining. Instead, Free Trade has meant that farmers in developing countries are encouraged to grow cash crops like coffee, cocoa and cotton, and to do so in such a way that many of the villagers are able to move to cities where they can make shoes, clothing and many of the things that allow Walmart to maintain its famously low prices. In return, developing countries import food crops such as corn and wheat that we grow in surplus. In the lovely land of theory, the benefit to this is that the local farmers will make money from the cash crops, more than enough to purchase the food they need, our corporate agri-business will have foreign markets for the food crops they grow across the midwest. Oh, and we'll be able to drive to the local mega-mart and buy "cheap plastic crap."

And we ~ you, me, our families and neighbors ~ are culpable because we elect people and then pay little attention to what they agree to in international trade agreements or the farm bill. And too many of us never wonder whether there are consequences beyond our own bank accounts and immediate self-interest.

Now, throw corn-based ethanol into the mix, and the fields that were full of food-grade corn or wheat or barley are being used for ethanol-grade corn. Corn that was going to feed cattle is also redirected, the prices pushed up prohibitively high, and so the feed lots and ranchers purchase barley and other grains. The domino effect ensues, and the prices for these other grains skyrockets right along with corn.

However, the income for the farmers growing cotton in Togo has not risen, and they are using all their means to cultivate cotton so that they don't have enough food crops to feed their families. Look further east, and it's the same, as the rice paddies in Vietnam have been turned into coffee plantations to bring us our cheap cup of Folgers, and so the developing nations find themselves in the horrific place of having too few people on too few acres of arable land growing food crops. Food prices soar and people go hungry.

I saw this happening first-hand when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I was sent to Togo to educate and encourage farmers ~ who had been hand-tilling small family plots of yams, corn, tomatoes, other food crops ~ to begin using oxen to till larger parcels of land. And to grow cotton. What I discovered was a situation that often resulted in the farmers becoming something like indentured servants. The Togolese government provided the loans for the cattle and accompanying training, as well as the loans for the cotton seed. Then, the government also set the price for cotton. The end result was that the absolute only way that a farmer could dig himself out of the debt incurred from purchasing oxen was to grow virtually no food, use all available land for cotton, and to dump loads of chemicals into the soil to produce the largest yields possible.

Oh, and I must point out that, while DDT and similar pesticides are banned in the US, there is still a thriving market for them in places like Togo. And, contrary to their manufacturer's evident hypothesis, the side-effects aren't lessened just because it's a developing nation.

So, back to our friends, Kodjo and Adjo, and their mother Afoua...

Kodjo is a student at Lome University, Adjo is in high school (and high school in Togo costs almost as much as the university). The rising prices have left them without funds for school, and Afoua is without enough for food. She is also chronically ill. So we are helping them.

I don't know if it makes it better or only more sad that for a little over $400 we can send Kodjo and Adjo to school for a year and provide Afoua with enough money for food and medicine. The money is not insignificant to us, but it's brutally significant to them. We will have to make adjustments, but they get education and some health care.

I am glad that our current presidential candidates are talking a lot about the economy. However, while they argue about tax cuts and job cuts and the banking and mortgage crisis for us, it is my very dear wish that they'd also think and talk a little about our influence in far-off, tiny countries like Togo.

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.

Thing 18 - You Tube

Viewing You Tube videos is one of the few ways that I actually "play" on my computer. I can waste a significant amount of time perusing videos, though I don't think I'm the "typical" you-tube viewer. I love looking for new videos from places in Europe and Africa where I've lived/traveled. I also like looking at mashups put together by Browncoats (those freakishly devoted to the Firefly series and the movie Serenity) and Discworld aficionados (those freakishly fanatical about the stories by Terry Pratchett).

However, what I have never found You Tube to be particularly good at was helping me find practical information. I'm sure it's out there, and a percentage is probably well made. But generally speaking, it hasn't been useful in that way. I looked for a video on weeding a library collection... nothing found. At least nothing relevant. I was thinking that it would be good to add such a beasty into the GRRL weeding manual wiki (which I'm currently updating). Guess we'll have to make it ourselves.

Anyway, here's a short video clip of the market in Kpalime, Togo, about 15 k from where I lived a lifetime and a half ago (okay, from 1990 to 93). I've spent many a day perusing the aisles here, looking at beads and fabric, mostly. If my memory serves, there was some excellent street food to be found there as well.